"Speak so I can understand you!" Moya cried. "Ah, if I might! A man must
not have secrets from his wife. Secrets are destruction, don't you think?"

Moya waited in silence.

"Now we come to this bondage!" He let the words fall like a load from his
breast. "This is a hideous thing to tell you, but it will cut us apart
unless you know it. It compels me to do things." He paused, and they heard
a door down the passage open,--the door of his mother's room. A step came
forward a few paces. Silence; it retreated, and the door closed again
stealthily.

"She has not slept," Paul murmured. "Poor soul, poor soul! Now, in what I
am going to say, please listen to the facts, Moya dear. Try not to infer
anything from my way of putting things. I shall contradict myself, but the
facts do that.

"The--the guide--John, we will call him, had a long fever in the woods. It
would come on worse at night, and then--he talked--words, of a shocking
intimacy. They say that nothing the mind has come in contact with under
strong emotion is ever lost, no matter how long in the past. It will
return under similar excitement. This man had kept stored away in his
mind, under some such pressure, the words of a woman's message, a woman in
great distress. Over and over, as his pulse rose, countless times he would
repeat that message. I went out of the hut at night and stood outside in
the snow not to hear it, but I knew it as well as he did before we got
through. Now, this was what he said, word for word.

"'Do not blame me, my dear husband. I have held out in this place as long